And in 2018, in an interview with Respekt, he objected to the objection that his paintings of that time were depressing: “The fact that I was creating something at all at the time is positive about them. All that time before had been depressing. And I painted so that the testimony about her remained in my paintings. “
Informal as a reflection of reality
Sion originally, together with his friends from the group Confrontation (1960) Antonín Tomalík, Aleš Veselý, Vladimír Boudník and others, devoted himself to the informal direction that came from France. Of course, our creators can be inspired by, for example, Tapies or Dubuffet, but mainly by the reality in which they had to live and create.
As Šmejkal writes in the mentioned text, informal was characterized by “consistent denial of color, reduction of palette to black and white scale or dark monochrome harmonies, emphasis on rough, non-painting materials – rags, sheets, wires, planks, ropes, joined by acronex and synthetic varnishes and processed tanning, engraving, scraping, welding ‘. In short, informal was characterized by a brutal approach to painting, to creation – which was nothing more than a reflection of how reality approached the artists themselves.
From the informal period we can see in Roudnice, for example, the paintings Under the Horizon I (1961), the gray-blue Untitled IV (1961–1962) or Triptych II (1961), treated with fire, as well as the Blue Structure (1962–1963). An interesting look back at perhaps the Picasso influence are the consistently dense figures of the Great Bathing Oil (1961–1962).
Apocalyptic grasshoppers
Sometime in the mid-1960s, Zion – entirely in the logic of his work and how he perceived it – turned to Old Testament inspiration, firstly in the Grasshopper cycle (1966), but mainly with the oil Apocalyptic Grasshopper (1965–1966), a kind of “half-threatening, half-threatening” a grotesque monster, a modern symbol of destruction and the end of the world ”.
Perhaps it is not a short quote from the Revelation of St. John that harms: “The locusts sprouted from the smoke; they were given the power that earthly scorpions have. They were ordered not to harm the grass on the ground or any greenery or trees, only to people who are not marked with God’s seal on their foreheads. (…) Those locusts looked like an armed war cavalry; they had something like golden wreaths on their heads, their faces were like men, their manes like women’s hair, but their teeth were like lions. They seemed to have iron armor, and their wings roared, as if a multitude of sleds were rushing into battle. And they had scorpion-like tails and stings in them to torture people for five months. Above them had the king, the angel of the abyss, with the Hebrew name Abaddon — that is, the Destroyer. ”
Zion also inspired John’s Apocalypse in the oil In the Sign of the Star of Wormwood (1966), which depicts a shooting star in the upper plan, and something like hell in the lower plan. Exactly according to St. John: “And the name of the star was Wormwood. And the third part of the waters became wormwood, and many men died of the waters, or were bitter. ”What would the Old Testament illustrated by Zion look like? Maybe unorthodox, but he would probably be authentic and convincing.
Freedom from anxiety
In the late 1960s, he accidentally came up with a technique that he then followed – in essence, he modeled his characters or plants from seemingly melted spots, reminiscent of color changes combined with the Sabatier effect on psychedelic photographs from the late 1960s. However, they were not so dark. In short, “kaleidoscopic cracking of colored microdetonations”, as aptly described by art historian Antonín Hartmann.
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